This morning, I took a walk along the Rivanna River. It’s the first time I’ve walked the area since the Woolen Mills dam was demolished last August, and the changes seemed quite dramatic.

Now mind you, it’s been some years since I walked the Riverview. Time was — when I lived near the river, in the section of town called the “Woolen Mills,” after the mill founded there in 1841 — I walked that trail every day, winter or summer, whether the weather was dry and fine or ice and snow. My daily companion on those expeditions was Jade, a lab-collie mix with a pure white coat, root beer eyes, a pink mottled nose, and the best disposition of any animal it has ever been my pleasure to share my life with. If an animal can, in fact, be a spirit guide, then she was surely mine … But Jade died in 2002 after a short bitter fight with liver cancer–and I’ve barely set foot on that trail or even in the park that’s the entrance to it since…

But today, I promised a friend who runs a community service agency — QCC, the Quality Community Council — that I would join the ladies taking part in one of her weekly health walks. There were about a dozen of us–some elderly, some disabled, a mother with a toddler, one woman in full walkers’ regalia including an iPod armband. We got a brief pep talk from Susan Pleiss, a volunteer wrangler extraordinaire who does amazing work with parks and gardens and transportation and the poor, and Chris Jensic, the city planner who works with the trails system. Then we all set off in a big crush… but in short order I found myself … all by myself.

I got left behind rather quickly because I had to stop to look at the river. It had been many years since I’d taken a good long look at it, and I noticed the changes wrought by the destruction of the dam immediately. From a deep, sluggish, mossy green snail, the river had turned shallow, wide, clear, quick-moving as a coachwhip snake over rocks that I had never even known were there.

The deep shade cover made the walk blessedly cool, so I walked a bit slower (and, as it happened, a lot farther) than everyone else. I took the time to listen to Susan and Chris bemoaning the colonies of invasive Japanese bindweed that were overtaking the riverbanks (one was literally as tall as a house). I watched bees pollinating chest high stands of milkweed. I stopped to pick mulberries from a tree at the side of the path and exchanged a few laughs with a guy on a mountain bike who stopped and pulled down the branches so I could reach them, then fed handfuls to his daughter.

Cardinals and grackles and catbirds were calling, and there was a memory around every bend. There was where Jade got into a fight with that mean-ass Dalmation. There was where she’d launch herself after sticks until my arm was heavy and aching and her tongue lolled almost to the ground. There was where I scattered her ashes…

But there was much that was new, too. The city has widened and resurfaced the path so that it’s more like a ped-bike superhighway than the little goat track we used to scramble up and over. The deepest, darkest, shadiest portion of the trail–the section where Riverview Cemetery looms 100 feet on a sheer bluff overhead–is now dappled with sunlight because the city permitted a luxury development that decimated the enormous trees that used to block the light. And the trail just keeps going now instead of ending at the city limits.

This requires some explanation: The city and the county actually got together (this may sound strange to folks from other states, but in Virginia, they’re separate and often competing entities) and connected their trails. So now, instead of just ending at U.S. 250, at the city-county line in effect, the trail winds under the Free Bridge, and continues along the river through Darden Towe Park to end in Pen Park, on the far north end of town. … Now I don’t know about you, but to me, the thought of walking through woods in a complete circuit around the east side of town from the southern limit of the city to the northern– that’s cool. I can’t wait to try it.

So I’ll return to Riverview. In addition to the scary, ropy vines of poison ivy — thick as my arm — climbing the sycamores beside the trail, I saw Queen Anne’s Lace and wild yarrow. And the milkweed is just starting to mature. The umbels, though as big as my fist, are just starting to turn a rich coral color. Soon they’ll start attracting monarch butterflies. I want to be there to see that. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get a picture.

(P.S. Apologies for not posting any pictures with this. I didn’t have my camera today, but I’ll be going back soon!)